The clouds continued swelling like poisoned fish … I take off my shirt, I show you. I’ve become as soft and defenseless as a drug-infested city. With or despite our scars, we stay alive.
John Yau, “Modern Love”
Carolyn Forché, “Taking Off My Clothes”
John Yau, “Modern Love”
Marilyn Hacker, “Scars on Paper”
NOTE: As regular readers of Diary Poems know by now, if they didn’t before, a cento is a poem made up of lines borrowed from other poems. This cento uses two lines from the same poem, out of sequence. (Two lines of a poem are commonly seen as the maximum permitted under the fair use exemption to the US Copyright Act of 1976, unless the poem is very short.) The title of this cento alludes to the final stanza of “In Passing,” by Lisel Mueller.
I love this. The lines work so beautifully together (and with the photo).
"With or despite our scars, we stay alive." ...ooph!